Today's commentary ("Google's Soft Spot") by Charlene Li of Forrester Research suggests that Yahoo and MSN are about to eat Google's lunch.

Not so fast, says Traffick Research. While we certainly feel vindicated in finally having convinced someone that portal power is a force to be reckoned with, Li makes a few points we'd dispute.

Li outlines various search features that Google is supposedly ill-suited to offer. It may be true that portals have considerable data that will help them research things like user intent, but Google, too, has heaps of user data at its disposal.

In case someone forgot, Google's search market share -- the number of search queries it processes in a day -- still outstrips the portals by a significant margin. In terms of discerning user intent, all search engines are working on such problems. Arguably Google is doing more advanced research on semantic technology (behind the scenes) than the portals are. Who's to say? In rolling out Orkut social networking, and perhaps free email, Google may be able to gather even more information about its users. Perhaps, as some have suggested, Google is turning into a bit of a, well, portal.

And then there is Li's comment that Google has some work to do to "overcome a deep-seated cultural focus on search." Wha-? Fortunately for Google, the planet has a deep-seated cultural focus on search. And in spite of their grandeur, clever use of punctuation, and recent profitability, the public has retained a deep-seated suspicion of portals while being quite happy to make use of the portal services that prove most useful. Like e-mail. The portal service that is going to lose big market share to Google next quarter.